Founder and CEO
Intempo

As an eight-year-old violinist, Angélica Durrell emigrated with her mother from Ecuador to the United States, and they settled in Connecticut’s Fairfield County. Now, 26 years later, Durrell is CEO of Intempo, a music education organization she founded to serve the local immigrant community.

“Intempo is a reflection of my life,” said Durrell, who comes from a family of musicians in the Chimborazo region of the Andes. “I created Intempo for immigrant children and families who did not have an institution to support them in pursuing a high quality classical and intercultural music education.” Some of the largest immigrant populations in Fairfield County are from Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

Durrell started Intempo with $1,500 in graduation gifts she received from family and friends upon getting her music degree from the University of Connecticut in 2011. Today the nonprofit organization boasts operating revenues of more than $1.2 million in 2022, when it was awarded the $500,000 Lewis Prize for Music, which promotes access to music education for youth.

“We started with 30 students in one site,” she said. “Now we serve over 700 students across 10 different sites. I was a solo entrepreneur the first two years, then we added three teachers, and now we have 18 teaching artists and five administrators.”

Durrell is an advocate for complementing classical music with the folk and pop music of her students’ homelands. “Our kids love Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but they also love their hip-hop. And they love to learn to play traditional instruments like the charango, a 10-string guitar from the Andes.” In its annual Cultural Crossover Concert, Intempo partners with the Norwalk Youth Symphony to focus on a specific national musical genre, such as this year’s performance of bachata music from the Dominican Republic.

In 2024, Intempo, which has been sharing space with a church, will move into its own arts and culture center in Stamford. It also plans to launch the online Intempo Music Catalog, making available diverse, intercultural scores from Latin America.